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Westlake Academy students win indie book award
By CHRISTINA ROWLAND/ Staff Writer
Westlake Academy students recently learned they have won a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book award in the category of “education/academic”. The award is an equivalent to winning an award at the Sundance film festival.
The 29 student-authors beat out adult authors competing in the same category. Their book, The Best of the Black Cow: Great Writing by Great Kids, is a compilation of stories that have been published in their student newspaper over the past three years.
Their student newspaper is printed monthly and is open to all students at the school. The newspaper is not a school class, as it is in most schools, but rather a volunteer opportunity that the students have a choice to make. Westlake Academy parent and published writer David Lieber is the club sponsor for the event.
When he decided to make stories from the paper into a book he said he first picked out chapter titles for the book and then spread out all the issues before him on a table and took the stories that stuck out to him and fit within the chapter titles.
There are 29 current and former students that contributed to the book. The book covers the past history of Westlake that the students have learned about while in school and the history they have been apart of, such as the 2007 bond election.
One of the chapters called “Our Town” covers some of the history of the Westlake Community.
Student and Southlake resident Jordan Lee wrote the piece the living legacy about former mayor Scott Bradley and his wife, Kelly.
She never knew her piece on the former mayor would lead to her being part of a book that won a national award.
Lee said the piece on the mayor was the biggest she has ever written. She said when she went to write that piece that she wanted to capture the story with a phrase.
“A living legacy really captures what he (former mayor Bradley) has done.”
Lee’s interest in the paper began when she saw the group meeting after school in her sixth-grade class and by seventh grade she was a part of those meetings. Lee, like most of the students, has no formal journalism training since the class does not exist in their school. Advisor Lieber lets everyone who wants to take part.
“You can’t deny the next Hemingway,” he said.
Despite the lack of formal training that traditional writers receive, Lieber feels that the school does an excellent job of teaching the students the skills needed to be in a newsroom.
Westlake Academy is an International Baccalaureate School and has a unique curriculum that teaches students to be inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective people from kindergarten on. These are the skills that he thinks are necessary to be a strong writer.
Lee said the thing taken away from her newspaper experience is to be aggressive.
“He (Lieber) tells us to be aggressive with what you do,” Lee said.
Being aggressive has led Lee and 28 other students to become nationally recognized award-winning authors. In addition to the Indie book award, The Black Cow newspaper has won more than 100 individual newspaper awards in Texas. To order a copy of the book call 817-490-5721.
The following are comments from the readers.
In no way do they represent the view of Starlocalnews.com
In no way do they represent the view of Starlocalnews.com
Michael Eaton wrote on Jun 5, 2009 8:35 AM:
" Westlake has its own newspaper; why do you waste space in the Southlkae Times with Westlake Academy propaganda? That school (which my dauhgter had the misfortune of attending for 2 years she can't get back) is the biggest joke in the metroplex. The adminstrators have a history of lying, cheating (worse than Old Union's principal ever thought about) on TAKS tests, and dramatially overstating all of their achievements. The truth is that all test results show WA to be far below AVERAGE in math and science at all level;s of testing. Now that's a story you may want to actually cover, to show how infeerior WA is to CISD in math and science achievements.... "
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